Benjamin Wachs: What happens now that libertarianism is dead?

However Congress handles the bailout plan, the closing bell on Wall Street rang out the end of libertarianism as a governing philosophy.

Benjamin Wachs

However Congress handles the bailout plan, the closing bell on Wall Street rang out the end of libertarianism as a governing philosophy.

Let us mourn the loss: it was a noble idea that couldn't cope with the demands of the modern world.

Under a libertarian system, only a few very basic services could be considered "too big to fail": the military, Emergency Medical Systems, the police, the courts ... am I leaving anything out? Maybe building inspectors, though that's open to debate.

But in the last few weeks, we've seen the definition of "too big to fail" stretched to lows we never thought we'd reach: trading companies, insurance dealers, mortgage brokers. Businesses that, in a traditional world, would never be considered "essential."

The whole notion of economic autonomy is stretched to the breaking point if you can do everything right and still lose it all because of a bad deal made by someone you have nothing to do with who works in a trivial industry.

Worse, the whole notion of personal responsibility is turned on its head if the craven and irresponsible high jinks of cokeheads fresh out of Harvard who think they're entitled to other people's money can get you fired from your job in an unrelated field on the other side of the country even though you've always played by the rules.

But that's the world we live in: interconnected to such a degree that it is now impossible to both live a modern life and be reasonably independent. You have to choose one or the other.

As a society, we've already made our choice – and that means that soon even more companies in even more industries will be considered too big to fail. What's next in the modern economy?

Google? The Associated Press? Microsoft? Maybe we can do without them – it gets less likely by the year – but what about the Internet itself? What if colossal mismanagement of the sort we're now all too familiar with would force most Americans offline if the government didn't fund a bailout ... could we handle that? Or is the Internet now "too big to fail"?

We may not like it – I don't – but unless we want to turn back the clock to a simpler time (and mankind is not an animal that can tell time in that direction), then it's better that we accept this fact sooner rather than later: The society we have, based on notions of individual responsibility, autonomy, privacy, and a firm distinction between business, government, and personal life, just isn't cut out to handle the world we've made.

Libertarianism is dead, and to a degree we never appreciated we were all libertarians.

Next!

But what happens next? How do we organize a society in which the only way to survive is if we are all our brother's regulator?

Socialism is not an answer: It failed for the exact same reason 20th-century capitalism fails when exposed to 21st-century technology -- people are too greedy and stupid to exercise what little self-control is required to make the system work.

Libertarianism, socialism and free market capitalism are all serious forms of government for serious people capable of acting like adults. For the FaceBook age, we need a government system aimed at people who can't stop acting like children. People who can't willingly put their BlackBerries down need a different kind of oversight than people who can.

We've been decrying the idea of a "nanny state" for decades, but ironically, it may be just the thing to save us now.

Some fundamentals are inviolable: basic rights and freedoms, checks and balances in government, accountability in both laws and law enforcement are non-negotiable. But mandatory retirement accounts run by professionals who don't work on commission might be just what we need; limited liability corporations, with their presumption that you can own a company yet not be held responsible for what it does, may not belong in a post-libertarian society; and any institution that becomes "too big to fail" may be required to become a public-private partnership so that it can be run transparently and accountably, not just to "shareholders" but to "citizens."

These are outrageous ideas that I am deeply uncomfortable with. But constantly propping up irresponsible, unaccountable, institutions that are "too big to fail" is no better.

And that's what will keep happening in a world filled with interconnected institutions, vital to the everyday lives of millions of people, that are run by delayed adolescents with no sense of consequences, or right and wrong.

Which, in a MySpace world, seems to be most of us.

A libertarian philosophy simply isn't appropriate for a world where self-control and maturity are no longer seen as virtues. It follows like "banks" and "bailouts."